“Embrace Your Madness”

The girl had a secret. She was only 16. But she was smitten, and she lied. She told him she was 20. And that’s not all she hid: Marie Modiano happened to be the daughter of one of the most respected novelists in France. It took several months for Marie and Tristan to go beyond the occasional coffee — after their third rendezvous, in early 1995, Tristan flew back to America and spent the whole spring out in the tiny coal-mining town of Huntingburg, Indiana, home of the Evans clan, his surviving blood relatives, shooting squirrels and clay pigeons with his cousin and scribbling away at his book — but when he returned to Paris, he and Marie were instantly an item, inseparable.

He met her parents soon enough, at the family’s dinner table. Dominique Modiano was a jewelry-maker, elegant and down-to-earth, with large eyes and fine black hair pulled back into a bun. She spoke both English and French, unlike Patrick Modiano. Patrick was shy. He was also famous. At the age of 23, he’d had his first novel championed by Éditions Gallimard, the most prestigious house in France, publisher of Marcel Proust and translator of Hemingway. At age 49, he lived comfortably, but not extravagantly, in a large, tasteful apartment fit for a cabinet minister, writing every day and walking his dog, a gray poodle. Patrick was largely female-surrounded and melodrama-free — until Tristan. Until this huge American dude showed up at his dinner table, bursting with exotic stories about Middle America and the people who lived there: “river rats” and “hill scrubs,” inbred folk, dumb and fearful, shotguns under their pillows, pointing fat shaky fingers to UFOs in the sky.

Strangest thing. On his way back to Paris just now, Tristan had swung through Lancaster, spending two months hacking away at Paula’s computer, word-processing his manuscript, then mailing 70-some copies to New York publishing houses; it was still early, but as far as he could tell, every manuscript had landed with a thud (and soon he’d have the sheaf of rejection letters to prove it). But now, in Paris, he owned all of these tales. In English and bits of broken French, he told the Modianos about his misadventures in New York publishing. He told them stories about the Evans men — about Warren, his grandfather, the dashing Army Ranger captured by the Nazis during World War II … and about Colin, his cousin, who had grown up with cystic fibrosis and resented it so completely that he went to work in coal mines, sucking coal dust into his bad lungs. He talked about El Oso, of course. There at the dinner table, he reeled off an epic about an America they had never known existed — and which seemed to have expelled Tristan into exile. “He reminded me of the Lost Generation writers,” says Patrick, through a translator, adding, “Il avait la force de ça génération.”

He carried the force of that generation.

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